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  5. At the Mercy of the Market? E-Commerce, Warehouse Work, and Job Quality in the United States

At the Mercy of the Market? E-Commerce, Warehouse Work, and Job Quality in the United States

File(s)
Kowalski At the mercy of the market.pdf (1016.1 KB)
Permanent Link(s)
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/123109
Collections
ILR Articles and Chapters
Faculty Publications - Human Resource Studies
Author
Kowalski, Alexander M.
Pinto, Sanjay
Gutelius, Beth
Vallas, Steven P.
Abstract

The growing popularity of e-commerce has made warehouses increasingly vital to retailing. The authors test the proposition that competition for online consumers translates into harsher work conditions inside the warehouses that make e-commerce possible. They use data from three surveys, one providing a national sample of US warehouse workers and two targeting those at Walmart and Amazon, the country’s largest retailers. In the national sample, job quality and worker well-being are lower in warehouses engaged in e- commerce than in traditional warehouses, but this relationship varies across the two firms. The negative effects are most pronounced at Amazon’s e-commerce warehouses, which emphasize speedy delivery. These same effects are less significant at Walmart’s facilities, which aim to offer low prices. Future research should explore whether firms vying for e-commerce business are likely to emulate Amazon, converging on a set of labor practices that diminish work conditions in a growing sector.

Date Issued
2026-05
Publisher
SAGE
Keywords
empirical analysis
•
employment systems
•
job satisfaction
•
strategy
•
workplace
•
industry studies
•
human resource management practices
•
business values
•
competition
Related DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/00197939261444716
Previously Published as
Kowalski, A. M., Pinto, S., Gutelius, B., & Vallas, S. P. (2026). At the mercy of the market? E-commerce, warehouse work, and job quality in the United States. ILR Review, 1-37.
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Rights URI
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Type
article

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